Author
Topic: George Hotz (geohot) VS Sony.

So I've been kinda following the whole thing about him jailbreaking the PS3 and how Sony took his ass to court for it. I'm pretty interested in following it, mostly because I'm a big PS3 guy, and I hate how he's gonna give more people an opportunity to pirate some more and cost game developers money that could be better used for making some new games perhaps, but I'm really following it because I hate how every little pirating fanboy is defending him, saying it's their right to play with their system how they like. First up, no, you wanna download games free, stop pretending you're gonna do something special outside of piracy, if you wanna do homebrewed programs and gaming, do it on your pc which is okay to modify however you like (not really but eh). Second, I love how all these kids are claiming corporations are money grubbing scum suckers and such, when in reality, you're costing the working class employees money by what you're doing. If you bite sony's ass and they lose a few million dollars, they lay off the people who are less integral to the company (and get paid less overall). The corporate bigwigs lose nothing, they're set for life, all you're doing is hurting working people by stealing games. It's like stealing from a local video gamestop or a best buy. The working class employees (the ones who get aid for actually labor) are the guys who're gonna get fired. Best Buy executives and Gamestop corporate brass just shrug off a few stores to regulate their weekly checks back to 5 and 6 figures.

Enough of my ranting though, how about some opinions, I'd love to get some discussion going about this.

Cmon man, you seriously buy into that anti-piracy stuff? He's modifying a console that he's 100% aware of will be used as a means to download and play games for free. His attempt at working with Sony to close up security holes....what's to prevent him from using the information he gets from them to open bigger holes in their programming? Sorry, but you're look at that is a little naive, Anuubis. He knows what it's going to be used for, and if he cared that much about prevention, he'd have not released the root key, but perhaps in an honest attempt to show he's so anti piracy, a crack to reinstall the secondary OS feature, which is what he's swearing up and down about being the reason he did this all in the first place. Considering he also said he doesn't have a psn, which is the only way he'd have updated his system to begin with to lose said feature, which would mean this whole process wasn't necessary anyway, I'd say he's just doing this to get at Sony knowing full well what it's going to do.The domino he knocked down may not be the piracy problem, but he sure as hell has his dominoes lined up with that as the goal.

Obviously, it's all a matter of how much of the truth he's telling and how much is proven in court, but honestly he's too smart to to be that painfully honest.

@MGF Yeah, some people do want just homebrew, I can attest to that. But honestly speaking, how many people who have hacked devices like PSPs and Iphones honestly do it for homebrew alone? Alot less than the guys who pirate, I'm sure. Maybe it's just because I deal with such a large amount of grimy people on a day to day basis, but I'm definitely more inclined to think on the negative side in this all.

(oh, and just to maintain civility for the hopeful duration of all this, I'm not calling out anyone who advocates homebrew or defends geohot's posistion as a pirate or thief or such. This topic is just for opinions, not to condemn or praise anyone...cept geohot, I don't like him much at all >_>)

Again, fallacious. Sony removed Other OS (dick move, btw, I still don't agree with that) from PS3s in 3.21 or whatever the firmware update was. The Condor Cluster's not running 3.21+; they haven't agreed to the PSN ToS nor have they tried to play games, they still have access to Other OS. Dick move by Sony removing that feature, but even when people were using it to run software, hypervisor access restricted the RSX - you couldn't run PS3 games that way, you could only use 6 of the 7 cell processor cores.

Now, again, I don't agree with Sony's removal of this feature - Dick move - but there are lawsuits against them for this just the same as they're suing GeoHot. But there is significant legal different between what the USAF is doing and what GeoHot did.

I've been following this closely and the latest developments have been hilarious. People who donated are outraged because they funded his vacation in South America, the gaf thread is hilarious.Hotz seems to be an arrogant prick but it's true that his exploits didn't allow piracy. But it helped. A lot. If you're still on the old FW running pirated games is so easy that even a child can do it. There was a point where everyone thought that there was nothing sony could do about it and things were looking really bad, it's no wonder that they're trying to make an example out of him. It's a complicated issue because even if you're intentions are good (I'm all for homebrew and being able to do whatever you want with the hardware you purchased) it will inevitably open the floodgates for piracy.At the end of the day people like Hotz should just keep a low profile because they know these things will get them into trouble, boasting about it on the net really isn't a smart move, now he's facing the consequences.Seriously though, donating money to this guy... I mean, come on. These people could've donated that money to all kinds of causes but no, let's help a wise ass hacker fight an evil wordwide corporation. Seriously.

Yeah, trying to imply they're the same is, to be blunt, completely idiotic. You KNOW the Air Force is not going to use it in an illegal fashion, at least in the manner that'd undermine Sony's business, and either they made a specific business arrangement or they simply kept a bunch of Linux PS3s un-updated, if not both; I recall SOMETHING happening that was an official collaboration between the two. In fact, there's not hacking whatsoever on the Air Force's part to undermine the security as has happened with GeoHot, just jury rigging a network to do processing akin to a super computer.

Also: His key has been widely shared, and I've seen accounts of using it for piracy, so it's not as if it's only been used legitimately.

I just find it a jerk move to witch hunt on a guy that did nothing evil because some other people can do it. Hello Albert Einstein? Nicolas Tesla?Like I said, nobody has yet to use his key for piracy. I might come, but right now they were all using other exploits.

and about Hotz vacation:EDITED (banners on that site would probably get me told to remove the link)

Quote

In a lame attempt to direct traffic to their pathetic websites, a website has reported that Geohot has "fled" the country after court documents reveal a PSN account alleged to belong to him. Normally, we would not report on something so completely ridiculous but, unfortunately, this nonsense is starting to spread to mainstream websites.

Hotz is currently on vacation in a South American country. As common sense would dictate, there is no reason to "flee" from a civil case. These sites have based their claims on misinterpretations of the court documents and an image (see below) posted on Geohot's blog. Way to put two and two together, guys!

In the future, we recommend only getting your news from reputable sites, not random video game blogs. When there's something real to report on the case, you''ll read it here, as always. For the record, we are referring to the original source of the article, a blog called VGHQ.NET that just set itself up on March 1, 2011. Why mainstream news sites would source them is beyond me but let the conspiracy theories fly.

As for Sony's claims that Hotz has a PSN account under the name "Blickmaniac," they should probably take a closer look at the forum post they are using as evidence, since the geotag in the picture posted by the user leads to Cambridge, MA. That's not even close to New Jersey the last time we checked. So, yeah, life's good.

His lawyer also sent a nice letter to IGN telling them they are cretins. Lawyer also assures in said letter none of the legal funds were used.